We spend much of our lives working. And much of the time we are not working, we spend talking about work, recovering from work, fretting about work, or wondering if we should work more or work less.
But less often do we stop to think more deeply about work. What…
The other day, I took a break from my writing desk and went into the kitchen to make bread. There’s something therapeutic about the process of mixing flour and yeast and water, combining it, then turning it out onto the table to knead it into shape.
When I write, sometimes…
Several years ago, I attended a talk by the Canadian poet Erín Moure. She talked about poetry and translation and writing. It was a talk so full of brilliant insights that, as I jotted things down in my notebook, I struggled to keep up. …
I arrived in Yangon for the first time in January 2017, my life broken into pieces. The previous year had been punishing. In August, Elee, my partner of thirteen years, died of breast cancer. Before her death, we talked about what I would do after. I said I didn’t know…
It’s the time of year when, for those of us who live in countries and communities where Christmas is celebrated, we face the prospect of an explosion of gift exchange. This gift-giving raises all kinds of practical issues (as I asked in my last piece, what do you get a…
So, in those countries where Christmas is celebrated, it’s getting to that time of year when the eternal philosophical problem presents itself: what should I get as a gift for Uncle Pedro?
Last year’s socks didn’t go down well: he didn’t wear them even once. Then there was the debacle…
The philosopher Chrysippus was born sometime around 279 BCE in the town of Soli, now on the southern coast of Turkey. He remains intriguing to this day for his radical theory of human emotion.
The (always unreliable, and always entertaining) commentator, Diogenes Laërtius, says that Chrysippus first trained as a…
This is the second in a two-part series on ritual. In the first piece, I looked at how ritual helps us get by, sometimes almost magically, in a complicated social world (you can read part one of this series here).
But ritual is more than just a way of getting…
Sometimes, the most philosophically interesting things in human life are those things that are so close to us, we overlook their importance. …
Ethics stirs us up. It gets us hot under the collar. It leads to conflict, turbulence and dispute. So wouldn’t we be better giving up on our search for ethical truth?
The philosopher Pyrrho (c. 360 — c. 270 BCE) certainly thought so.
Pyrrho was born in Elis in Western…
